Creating a community culture of marking topics as solved

[Tris20 (Tristan)]

@ondrej

I thought this setting was enabled by default?

I’m pretty sure it is as well. @noahl I suspect you may have missed this because you aren’t the one creating the topics.

Circling back to the email notification, and the approach to solved as a whole, I stumbled across this quote from Sam as part of my search:

@sam

I don’t know, I view the “accepted answer” as a “nice to have” as opposed to a “every loop in the system must be closed”

Bugging people with email is a two edged sword, it may be effective, it may cause them to devalue emails from Discourse.

I share both of these views. I would even go further and say marking the problem as solved is most valuable when the Topic is two or more pages(~6 posts) long. For shorter Topics the user is likely to scroll through each post anyway and make the judgement for themselves.

@noahl

~25% are marked by admins/employees (~2.5% of all solvable topics) and ~75% is marked by the community (~7.5% of all solvable topics)

This sounds pretty good in terms of member contribution. It looks like the issue might be that the quantity marked as solved overall is low, rather than just the ratio.

Have you considered once a month/week, going through the list of unsolved topics and reaching out to the owners privately? The other question is, how useful is it to rely on the user’s contribution for this? In other words, is this user going to come back and ask 10 more questions, or are they only here for the one question and then leaving?